Story Visibility on Cogweald: Public, Unlisted, or Private?
Every Cogweald story has a visibility setting with three options: public (listed and readable by anyone), unlisted (readable by anyone with the link, hidden from the catalogue), and private (visible only to you). The choice controls two separate things — who can read, and who can find — and they're worth separating.
Public: listed and open
A public story is fully out there: it appears in the catalogue on the homepage, gets indexed for search, publishes an RSS feed anyone can subscribe to, and can be read by anyone, account or not. Choose public when the point is readers — it's the only mode that lets strangers stumble onto your story, and new chapters surface the world again each day. If growing an audience is the goal, our guide on getting readers for your serial starts here.
Unlisted: link-only
An unlisted story is readable by anyone you give the URL to, but it doesn't appear in the catalogue or get pushed to search engines — the quiet middle ground. Its RSS feed still works for those who have the link, so a private circle can follow along daily without the story being discoverable.
Choose unlisted when you want to share with specific people — friends, a writing group, a Discord — without publishing to the world at large. It's the digital equivalent of passing around a printed manuscript.
Private: just you
A private world is readable only by its owner. No catalogue, no feed, no link sharing — the story exists for you alone. It's the right mode for experiments, for premises you're not ready to show, or simply for people who want an AI-written serial as a private daily pleasure.
There's an underrated use for private worlds: rehearsal. Run a premise privately for two weeks to see whether the AI takes it somewhere good; if it does, either go public with a proven story or seed a sharper public world with what you learned. Nothing about a private world is wasted.
Changing your mind
Visibility isn't a birthmark — switching modes takes effect immediately. Moving a story to public is the consequential direction: the whole archive becomes listable and indexable at once, so a story that's been quietly running for thirty chapters arrives fully-formed when it goes public. Going the other way is just as instant.
A few details are worth knowing before you flip: comments and follows are unaffected by visibility changes — the community you've gathered stays — and going public retroactively opens the whole archive, not just new chapters. Search engines also treat a newly-public story as a new site: the full archive gets submitted for indexing at once, which is why a matured world can appear in search results with dozens of pages on day one.
Which should you pick?
- Public if readers are the point — most stories should end up here.
- Unlisted for sharing-without-publishing.
- Private for experiments and personal reading.
Whatever you choose, the story writes a chapter a day either way. Start a world — you can begin private and flip to public the day you're proud of it.
Sources
- Cogweald — Explore the story catalogue, https://www.cogweald.com/#main-content
- Cogweald — How to Get Readers for Your AI Serial, https://www.cogweald.com/blog/how-to-get-readers-for-your-ai-serial